Wrapping this morning's mist around me like a shroud, an old story emerged. Leaving his teacher
on a moonless night, a monk was given a lantern. As he reached for it his teacher blew the flame
out, and the monk was red; the intense red known as worm scarlet—tola’at shani in Hebrew—
extracted from tree-dwelling insects, crushed up and boiled in lye. Later, when alchemists learned how
to make a similar red from sulfur and mercury, they still named the color ‘little worm'—vermiculum.
Some things don’t change: we call it enlightened.

The Hippoeans, a warrior people of the High Steppes, worshiped Ares.
Especially their horses were pious. March to October they would only
eat reddish foods, which made them invulnerable to enemy arrows.

From March through October they refused to obey human commands
as those months they were in spiritual retreat.

Thus it was the Hippoean's horses who served as priests of Ares, god
of fertility and of war's "delayed infanticide."